They Retort, You Decide!

Hundreds of millions of dollars, countless hours on the trail—it all comes down to this. For three debates, 270 combined minutes, the candidates will actually talk to each other. One botched response, a roll of the eyes, or—heaven forbid—a truly revealing moment will mean the difference between winning and, well, being John McCain. Robert Draper goes behind the scenes, talks to an army of strategists, and reveals the dark-arts trickery and clever gamesmanship that could ultimately determine the next leader of the free world

You have been battered into a stupor of disaffection by a locust swarm of attack ads and unctuous doublespeak, courtesy of the most obnoxiously long campaign in history since the Crusades. Understood. But here is your reward: Beginning on October 3 and concluding two weeks before the presidential election, you will have three opportunities to watch the two leaders of the offending parties, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, crumble to pieces before your eyes.

Oh, it can happen. All sorts of things can happen—most of them bad—when two of the world's most insulated creatures are suddenly thrust into an oppressive atmosphere consisting of a desolate stage, grim-faced inquisitors, a stone-silent live audience, and an invisible American electorate monitoring every blink and stammer. And whatever happens in these three presidential debates will, in all likelihood, determine who takes the oath of office three months later.

That's not an overstatement. "The reality of what determines a presidential campaign, among the small percentage of voters who move back and forth," says former John McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, "are the debates, where 50 million people watch what these guys have to say. In the aftermath of a presidential campaign, the importance of the debate is so understated, almost an afterthought—when in reality it is absolutely, exponentially the most important thing that happens, times 100,000."

So consider the stakes, the pressure. And then consider something that might strike you as odd, given how long Obama and Romney have dwelled on the public stage—which is that neither man is skilled at this sort of thing. "Barack Obama, I would submit, is not a very good debater," says David Birdsell, the dean of Baruch College's School of Public Affairs and a renowned debate expert. "He's very cautious, he ramps down the arch of ambition that we otherwise see in his prepared spoken material—and it's distancing. He has that vocal tic where he says, 'Look,' and then pauses. The 'Look' is a gesture of impatience—saying that at best we don't fully understand the situation, or at worst 'I'm tired of dealing with these idiotic inquiries.' It's deeply condescending. Then he chooses his words very carefully, but they don't sound like they're coming from the human heart."

Wait—could that last sentence be describing someone else? Here is Birdsell's even less charitable view of Mitt Romney as a debater: "He shows an excess of caution in declaring his interests and perspectives. And he shows a degree of deftness at avoiding commitment—and consistently a failure to provide a compelling narrative of what drives him, either personally or in the policy arena. Now, he remembers figures well, and he looks great in doing what he does. But it's possible to rattle him. Remember when Rick Perry got under his skin? He replied with, 'I'll bet you 10,000 bucks.' When rattled, he runs to his inner Eddie Haskell."

So why do we put them through it? Probably because debates force these starchy, overrehearsed, vainglorious pontificators to be human, more or less. We need to see them fidget and fume and (maybe) flash some greatness; and (maybe) we enjoy making them suffer.

But why do we put America through it? Why permit the fate of our country to hinge on three ninety-minute performances that are unlike anything the winner will be expected to do as president?

If you look at history and talk to the experts of the art and science of presidential debates, you find that, during these ninety-minute proto-reality shows, some vital information we can't seem to get anywhere else is exchanged—even if the candidates screw up or if we take the wrong message from their screwups. You'll also find, if you talk to people who have directly advised Obama and Romney, either currently or in the past, that this year's verbal cage fight is anybody's game.

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There We Go Again—A Secret History of Debates

Political consultants, historians, and debate gurus are united in their opinion that debates are at once absolutely crucial and utterly meaningless. "Obviously on a substantive level debates don't mean much," says former Al Gore strategist Carter Eskew, "because nothing discussed is really relevant to what happens when you're president. But then you go to this other level: Do they reveal character and personality? And I think that in some ways they do."

Many such "revealing moments" are codified in our political mythology—which is to say, they're cruel reductions or outright misrepresentations of what took place. There's John F. Kennedy pitted against Richard Nixon in America's first-ever televised debate on September 26, 1960—the young senator looking as poised as James Bond, while Nixon sweats like a death-row inmate. In fact, the long-held belief that Nixon actually won this debate according to those who heard it on the radio is a myth, says Birdsell: "That poll of radio listeners wasn't at all a random sample and was mainly of rural Protestant listeners who didn't have TVs. The more convincing studies have Kennedy winning on both the visual and nonvisual dimensions."

Twenty years later,there's Ronald Reagan instantly diffusing charges of extremism by quipping, "There you go again," and trotting out one soothing narrative after the next while Jimmy Carter strangles on his bureaucratic minutiae. Fast-forward four years, by which time age had replaced ideology as the chief knock against him, and there's Reagan's ancient mind going blank as he falls silent in his closing remarks of the first debate against Walter Mondale—and then, in the second debate, there's Reagan adroitly dispatching the age question once and for all with the twinkly-eyed "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." "Roger Ailes fed him that line," one Reagan strategist told me with a laugh. Be that as it may, Mondale later admitted to debate moderator Jim Lehrer, "That was really the end of my campaign that night, I think."

There's Michael Dukakis in 1988, sounding every bit the bloodless technocrat in his reply to Bernard Shaw's startling question "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" (Stone-faced, Dukakis blinks. "No, I don't, Bernard.&") And there's out-of-touch George H. W. Bush in the 1992 town-hall debate, fumbling to understand a woman's query about how the national debt had personally affected his life ("I'm not sure I get it—help me with the question and I'll try to answer it")—and by merciless contrast, there's Bill Clinton "launching out of his chair and engaging her, relating to her," recalls Clinton strategist Paul Begala, who adds, "That was the defining moment of the election."

Most such "moments" are caricature-reinforcers at best and gross distortions at worst. Which is why most debate pros see their chief role as making these face-offs something other than on-the-level arguments about issues. "Debates aren't a game of Jeopardy!—it's not about question-and-answer," says debate coach Brett O'Donnell, whose clients have included President Bush in 2004 and candidate McCain in 2008. Instead, it's about looking "presidential," not screwing up, and whenever possible, making sure your candidate doesn't reveal what he or she actually thinks.

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"America, Jesus, Freedom"—How to Prepare a Candidate

Sometime this past january, after Mitt Romney suffered his second consecutive disappointing debate performance against Newt Gingrich and the GOP field in South Carolina, O'Donnell got a phone call from the governor's campaign. Romney needed his help.

Brett O'Donnell is the only full-time political-debate coach in the country. Earlier this primary season, he'd guided Michele Bachmann to a brief lead in the polls. Now he flew to Florida and exhorted his new client: No more using qualifiers that feed the perception of you as a flip-flopper. Attack Gingrich constantly. Call him a Washington insider and a Fannie-Freddie lobbyist. Make him so apoplectic he can't talk. It took some convincing before the mild-mannered Mitt became confident he could ecute such an aggressive strategy. But he did, crushing Newt in the next debate and subsequently in the Florida primary. "There was a discernible change in his performance," recalls University of Pennsylvania professor of public policy Kathleen Jamieson, the country's foremost debate scholar. "They cleaned up the tonal problem, and they cleaned up the nonverbal problem. I immediately started making calls to see if they had hired a new staffer."

ButRomney's brain trust didn't like the credit O'Donnell was getting for Mitt's turnaround and, after the Florida debates, promptly cut him loose. A few weeks later, according to two sources familiar with the situation, O'Donnell was quietly enlisted (albeit off the payroll) to compile a lengthy memo in preparation for Romney's primary debate in Mesa, Arizona. Romney eviscerated Rick Santorum in Mesa: "While I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the Bridge to Nowhere." Now, however, O'Donnell's stint in Romney World appears to be done.

To O'Donnell, debates are about, as he puts it, "the messaging opportunity." Some of this involves adjusting how the debater looks, stands, moves, and emotes, but mainly it's about firing off catchy rhetoric that may or may not be technically accurate—a view that runs counter to that of some of O'Donnell's co-workers. "My view is that you should be yourself, with some augmentations and coaching," says one political strategist. "Brett's concept is to conceal yourself. And I don't think it works."

Whatever the philosophy, the first task of a debate specialist like O'Donnell is to get the attention of the candidate, which is not always an easy proposition. Before the vice presidential debate of 2004, a John Kerry aide recalls, John Edward, "would blow off a debate-prep session and say, 'I'm gonna go relax and get some sun. It's more important that I look rested next to Cheney.' And there's some truth to that. But it's also true that Cheney's really good at cutting people's balls off. And Cheney ended up taking him apart."

Romney was also reluctant during his gubernatorial run in 2002. "He really didn't like the mock debate with strict timelines and stopwatch and full run-throughs," recalls an adviser. "He's a smart guy, and he's like, 'I get it. I don't need to do this as much as you think I need to.' I think we only ended up having two full-dress rehearsals, and that's unusual."

By contrast, Obama's impatience with the process during the 2007 primarieshad less to do with the prepping per se than with the aggravation of enduring debates that included as many as eight candidates. "He never thought those [multicandidate] debates were worthwhile, where you're standing up for ninety minutes and you'll have maybe three minutes to speak," recalls one Obama adviser. "So it was hard to persuade him to put aside the time to be ready for every eventuality." Agrees another adviser, "He could not have been less interested in prepping for them."

How engaged a candidate is during the prep process often depends on how good his sparring partner is. Some of the best include former New Hampshire Republican senator Judd Gregg, who was so effective at channeling Gore for the '96 vice presidential debates that GOP running mate Jack Kemp at one point shot him the finger. In 2008, Ohio senator Rob Portman excelled as Obama, though he wasn't the McCain campaign's first choice to play the young senator. O'Donnell initially wanted McCain to practice against a black man: former RNC chairman Michael Steele, who turned out to be, in the words of one McCain adviser, "a disaster."

For its part, the Obama team recruited an inspired choice to play Sarah Palin in Biden's VP-debate-prep sessions: Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. "She became Palin," gushes one member of Biden's team, while an Obama adviser adds, "Jennifer had that flirty, aggressive thing going on—she was fabulous." Granholm, who now hosts The War Room on Current TV, recalls, "I became a Palintologist. I really did learn a lot about her background and what motivated her. We had to try all scenarios, including if she was very weak and would just crater. We anticipated almost every single question. The two things we didn't anticipate were her winking and the 'Can I call ya Joe?' "

Steve Schmidt, a member of the McCain team, says that they, too, anticipated every single one of moderator Gwen Ifill's questions in the VP debate, except for "the question about nuclear proliferation." Palin's first words presaged trouble—"Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet"—but she eventually found her bearings. When Biden responded that McCain had voted against a comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, Palin dodged the matter—which, says Schmidt, was "absolutely" what she was coached to do whenever she encountered a question that hadn't come up in debate prep: dodge.

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"THAT'S FUZZY MATH"—HOW TO FIX A DEBATE

Ever since Nixon melted under the camera lights in 1960, both sides have brought in their party's craftiest stalwarts to negotiate every imaginable feature of the debates: how many, which subject in which order, podium versus sit-down versus free-range, whether or not to permit glasses of water and prepared notes, et cetera. For the 2012 debates, two veterans in election law—former Obama White House counsel Robert Bauer and Romney legal adviser Ben Ginsberg—handled the negotiations. In the previous cycle, then congressman Rahm Emanuel and senator Lindsey Graham wrangled over the details. In 2004, two of Washington's greatest firs squared off: James Baker, who outfod the Democrats during the 2000 Florida recount, and Vernon Jordan, who in 1997 discreetly assisted Monica Lewinsky in finding a job 200 miles away from the Clinton White House.

"Baker said, 'I want the foreign-policy debate to be first,' " Jordan recalls. "I said, 'Well, if you want foreign policy first, I want Cheney to stand [in the VP debate against Edwards].' Baker said, 'He can't stand! He's not well!' I said, 'Why do you think I want him to stand, Baker?' " Cheney ended up sitting, and in returnfor giving Baker foreign policy, Jordan was able to schedule a third debate for Kerry instead of two, as the front-running Bush camp originally wanted."Jim Baker and I are great friends," Jordan says. "When we prepared our final report, we didn't have a press conference. We just went down to the bar in the Waldorf and had a martini."

*5 Debate deciders

As elucidated by historians, gurus, and the politicians themselves*

Answering Dumb Questions

Here's a doozy from moderator Bernard Shaw to Michael Dukakis: "If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered," would it change his stance against the death penalty? Bernie, dude. WTF?—Jen Shcwartz

Getting Zung

"Unless there is a zinger—the cute line, the quotable moment—there's no victor," George W. Bush once said. The best zinger ever zung? Lloyd Bentsen to a defenseless, nearly teary-eyed Dan Quayle: "You're no Jack Kennedy."

Public Brain Farts

From Rick Perry's "oops" to James Stockdale's "Who am I? Why am I here?" chestnut, "it's death on wheels to forget why you're running," says Birdsell. "There are too many variants of this problem to count."

Gerald Ford claimed there was no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. He didn't get a second term.

Baker's rigors not only didn't carry the day for Bush—they backfired. "A great example of overthinking the debate rules was in 2004," says Steve Schmidt. "You come up with your debate negotiating strategy; it's fundamentally about trying to achieve maximum strategic advantage for your candidate. So having studied Kerry's past debates in his Senate races, what dawned on us was that he ran through the end of the question time. We decided to stop that from happening. Basically we negotiated everything but a trapdoor and an air-raid siren if John Kerry went over the limit. There was literally a flashing red light. At the end of the day, it had the opposite effect. We would've been far better off with a loquacious and ponderous Kerry than a disciplined and focused Kerry."

The Republican negotiators outsmarted themselves again four years later. "We got everything we wanted in debate negotiations [for McCain-Obama]," Brett O'Donnell says. Among these was a town-hall debate, a format in which McCain excelled. "He'd done thousands of those," recalls one of McCain's advisers. "McCain said, 'I'll thrive at this.' Then he walks onstage, and it's dead quiet. People aren't asking him goofy questions, no guy's wearing a shark costume—all the carnival atmosphere he loves is instead replaced by this dead, eerie climate, almost like you're in that in-between land between heaven and hell. It's not natural. And everybody, including McCain, wanted him to be able to wander around. He didn't look good wandering around. It was his worst debate."

In some cases, a candidate's subpar debate performance can be spun into victory. Kathleen Jamieson cites a classic case: the first Bush-Gore debate of 2000. In Jamieson's view, Gore clearly won."When Bush keeps saying, 'That's fuzzy math,' and Gore responds by naming specific legislation, you have the clearest contrast I've ever seen." But thissubstantive moment of 2000 has long been buried under the weight of a more enduring debate gaffe—that of Gore sighing melodramatically after his opponent's answers and, in a later debate, stepping directly into Bush's airspace, moments that the Bush team seized on."My sense was that we had destroyed Bush in that first debate," recalls Carter Eskew. "When I went into the spin room, that was the overwhelming consensus of everyone there. So then we flew off to someplace in Kentucky without cell coverage—and in the meantime, we got destroyed in the next twenty-four-hour spin cycle, which was probably malpractice on my part."

Adds longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, who also assisted Gore in debate prep, "Had the atmospherics not been used to say Gore lost the debate, I think that election would've been over. Because until then, we were on a roll."

It's widely acknowledged that the Bush team, led by Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, was peerless at the craft of post-debate spinning. Forgotten is their wizardry at pre-debate spinning. Both in 1994 against Texas governor Ann Richards and in 2000 against Gore, Bush's gurus all but begged pundits to assign long odds to the Misunderestimated One. Just prior to the 2004 debates, Bush strategist Matthew Dowd shamelessly insisted, "[John Kerry] is the best debater since Cicero." Dowd now says, "It is always important in politics to lower expectations, so that when you exceed them, you have a good story to tell. And this is very true in debates. The problem in 2004 was that it would have worked only if Bush had exceeded the low expectations. In that first debate, he didn't even do that. So you can't spin that, no matter what."

Throughout much of his public life, Barack Obama's debate performances failed to measure up to his oratorical prowess. But that changed on the evening of October 30, 2007, during the fourteenth of what would ultimately be twenty-six Democratic-candidate debates. By then, the young senator was trailing Hillary Clinton by a staggering twenty-one points. Befitting her front-runner status, Clinton was assigned the center podium in Philadelphia's Drel University auditorium, with three candidates on either side of her. Hillary appeared indomitable. Republicans already spoke of her as the Democratic nominee.

SenatorJohn Edwards was in third place behind Obama at the time, but as we now know, he was having formidabledomestic issues. His wife, Elizabeth, had recently discovered her husband's affair with videographer Rielle Hunter and was so incensed at the candidate that, according to Jonathan Prince, one of his strategists, she was interfering with the campaign. "She wouldn't let us do debate prep. It ended up being like a caricature of a spy movie: We had to wait till her car pulled out before we'd pull in and do secret prep sessions."

Despite the drama, Edwards had been performing surprisingly well in the debates, while Obama's disinterest showed. His answers were discursive, instantly forgettable. "It was almost as if he thought the debates didn't matter," recalls Edwards strategist Joe Trippi. But as Trippi well knew, his guy needed a tag-team partner to take down Hillary. "We would game things out: 'If you do this and Barack does that, wow, that'll really move the needle against Clinton,' " he says. "And Edwards would do it, and then it would be like, 'Wow, why didn't Obama see the opportunity?' Edwards had to do all the heavy lifting."

And so it went during the early stages of the Philadelphia debate. Clinton gave her crisp answers, Edwards responded with sharp jabs, and Obama shadowbod around the periphery. During the first commercial break, the candidates went backstage to huddle with their gurus. Obama ran into Edwards and, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation, complimented his relentless attack on Clinton. But Edwards wasn't in the mood for flattery.

"Focus, Barack," he snapped. "You've got to focus!"

Obama returned to the stage a different debater. He immediately raised his hand the next time Clinton spoke and laid into her—concluding by saying, "Part of the reason that Republicans, I think, are obsessed with you, Hillary, is because that's a fight they're very comfortable having. It is the fight that we've been through since the '90s. And part of the job of the next president is to break the gridlock and to get Democrats and independents and Republicans to start working together to solve these big problems, like health care or climate change or energy. And what we don't need is another eight years of bickering. And that's precisely why I'm running for president."

Then, with only six minutes left in the debate, co-moderator Tim Russert asked Clinton whether she supported then New York governor Eliot Spitzer's initiative to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Her response appeared to be sympathetic. But a minute later, after Senator Chris Dodd said he disagreed with the policy, Clinton committed her infamous equivocation: "I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done.&"

"Wait a minute!" Dodd pounced. Clinton protested. Russert pressed her. Clinton complained that "this is where everybody plays gotcha." When co-moderator Brian Williams tried to change the subject, Edwards wouldn't let him. "Unless I missed something," he said, "Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes." And when it came Obama's turn, he said to growing laughter, "I can't tell whether she was for it or against it, and I do think that is important."

What was actually important—both then and now—was that Hillary Clinton lost her aura of inevitability that night and Barack Obama learned to throw a punch. One year later, with the economy nose-diving, voters would measure Obama the debater not by his aggressiveness or his warmth but by his sober resolve. When I visited O'Donnell at his condo in Alexandria, Virginia, the debate coach and I watched a DVD of the first Obama-McCain duel. It started off with a rather predictable question about whether Obama supported TARP. "You know," Obama began, "we are at a defining moment in our history&"

O'Donnell smirked: "Here's a dead giveaway that he's giving a scripted answer—Obama's turning to the camera instead of the live audience." But then, as Obama proceeded over the next two minutes to define the economic stakes, describe his own economic-recovery proposal, and finally rip into his opponent for supporting Bush's failed economic policies, the former McCain adviser conceded, "It's a perfect debate answer. He starts with the 40,000-foot view, the vision thing, which is one of Obama's greatest strengths. And then the attack comes at the end, which forces the opponent to go on defense."

After watching his old boss's response—an unsteady monologue that began with lamenting Ted Kennedy's recent hospitalization, acknowledging the House Republicans' lack of support for TARP, and finally concluding, joltingly, with a call for energy independence—O'Donnell let out a sigh. "Yeah, the contrast is pretty substantial," he said. "There's no vision. One of his weaknesses from way back is that McCaintends to go down a rabbit trail in his answers. And the other is that he would talk like a senator. Now, once you get past the twenty or thirty minutes and they're debating foreign policy, Obama gets off-script, and I think he comes off poorly. I think McCain won the rest of the debate."

Still, against McCain's erratic composure, Obama's mentholated calm would carry the day, and, says an Obama adviser, "voters had a chance to see him as president."

But now that he is president, the circumstances are far less favorable. A listless economy has dragged his approval rating at or below 50 percent. Indeed, going into the three debates, Barack Obama seems to have only one thing in his favor: his opponent's own undistinguished history as a debater.

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BORING VOTERS TO SLEEP—THE DEBATE EDUCATION OF MITT ROMNEY

The first person ever to play Mitt Romney in a debate-prep session was David Smith, who had served as a policy adviser to Romney's opponent in the 1994 Senate race, Ted Kennedy. "Romney'd never been a candidate before, so we had to intuit what kind of debater he'd be," says Smith. "We watched everything he'd done on TV and read all of his interviews, but it was a matter of inferring. One thing turned out to be exactly right, and I think it's still right: He has a very tough time when pressed with follow-up questions. So we prepped to try to exploit that, and it largely worked."

Kennedy had visited the JFK library a few hours before the first debate, sitting at the replica of his brother's desk for two hours—"communing with ghosts," as an adviser would put it—and was very focused onstage. "We planned some moments," the adviser recalls. "With Teddy in '94, we planned to have him say, 'My family didn't go into politics to make money, and quite frankly, we paid a price.' But then there was a spontaneous moment when Romney couldn't describe what his health care plan would be, and Teddy said, 'Well, Mr. Romney, that's what you have to do when you legislate.' "

Romney would go on to lose handily to Kennedy, and as he prepared to run for governor against state treasurer Shannon O'Brien in 2002, he was still somewhat gun-shy. "Going into the debates in '02, there was a lot of trepidation on Mitt's part," says a senior official from the gubernatorial campaign. "He knew it wasn't his best format."

Indeed, Mitt "got pummeled by Shannon," says the official. O'Brien was feisty, while Romney made a feeble crack that went over poorly about how these debates were boring voters to sleep. A month before the election, Romney was suddenly ten points behind the Democrat. Searching for answers, the Romney brain trust encamped in Mitt's basement in Belmont, Massachusetts, and put together a new strategy. Mitt had previously refused to do more than one additional debate. Now he would agree to do two others, but only if they included three third-party candidates—all of them female, like O'Brien, and, says the adviser, "they were all nuts. Under the guise of being fair and open by letting the other three candidates in, making Mitt look like a hero, what we were really doing was making it Mitt versus the four crazy women. And it worked!"

Meanwhile, Romney strategist Mike Murphy had sought to game the final debate. Rather than it being organized by TheBoston Globe as in years past, Murphy had entered into backdoor negotiations to have this debate hosted by NBC and moderated by Murphy's pal Russert. The hope among the Romneyites was that Russert would be stretched thin by all the races he had to cover that year and would therefore be somewhat reliant on research material furnished by Murphy, who "thought he could get the edge in backgrounding Russert and nudging the debate in a certain direction," says a second adviser.

The outcome could not have been better for Romney. On the very first question to O'Brien, Russert asked why the candidate favored a teenager being able to have an abortion without parental consent when, under Massachusetts law, the same teenager wouldn't be able to get a tattoo without her parents' sign-off. "That question had never come up in the campaign," says O'Brien's campaign manager, Dwight Robson. When O'Brien responded with an awkward joke—"Would you like to see my tattoo?"—the crowd laughed nervously. "Then Tim hit her with a two-by-four: 'Ms. O'Brien, this is a serious issue!' " crows the first Romney adviser. "And we were just like, 'It's done.' "

"I give the Romney campaign a tremendous amount of credit," says Robson. "The funny thing is, she doesn't even have a tattoo."

Both sides agree that Romney's performance in 2002 was uneven but that O'Brien's implosion helped cost her the election. As a presidential candidate in the 2008 cycle, Romney exhibited more polish. But he was battered by charges of flip-flopping—so much so that the McCainites began to call him the Small-Varmint-Killing, Gun-Toting, Civil-Rights-Marching Fantasy Candidate. Fed up with his elusive counterpart, McCain uncorked this memorable put-down: "We disagree on a lot of issues, but I agree: You are the candidate of change."

O'Donnell would instruct McCain, "He equivocates all the time. Just listen for the moment you hear a conditional, then jump on it." Such a moment came on September 5, 2007, in a Durham, New Hampshire, debate, when Romney said, "The [Iraq] surge is apparently working."

"No, not 'apparently'—it's working," McCain shot back. Romney looked like he had been stabbed in the kidney.

During this year's primaries, Romney was still haunted by the occasional equivocation—most memorably when he answered "Maybe" to whether he would follow in his father's footsteps by releasing more than a decade's worth of tax returns. ("The debate team had discussed it," says one Romney adviser. "We thought the answer was supposed to be either yes or no, but not maybe.") Otherwise, the candidate has unquestionably improved—partly from experience, partly due to the economy replacing the Iraq surge as the key issue, and partly because the field was far weaker than in the previous election cycle. ("Newt and Santorum talked themselves out of a job," says a GOP strategist.) One former Romney adviser evaluates his candidate's progress thusly: "He is a quick thinker, well-spoken, well prepared. Generally speaking, if you ask him to ecute a strategy of 'do no harm,' he can do that. By contrast, if you ask him to move the ball forward, that becomes something outside of his comfort zone."

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270 MINUTES, AND THEN...

And so on October 3, two brainy Harvard graduates will do as each man has done dozens of times before—though never against each other, and never with the stakes so high. The president comes in with a historical disadvantage. As one top Obama adviser points out, "It's very difficult for an incumbent to win the first debate." And according to Brett O'Donnell, it's that first event that resonates most with voters—and in particular, he says, "debates are won or lost in the first thirty minutes."

But Mitt Romney will bring his own disadvantages with him to Denver on October 3. "He's much better than he was in 1994 or 2002," says a former adviser. "However, I'm very concerned about how he'll do in a one-on-one against Obama. There's a much higher degree of difficulty in thinking on your feet, and the focus always ends up being something that nobody predicted going in. I'm not sure how he'll do, because he doesn't have that core philosophy to guide him. So I give Obama a huge advantage going into these."

Then again, says one veteran GOP strategist, perhaps Romney will rise to the occasion out of necessity: "I think he's advantaged by the debates, because a debate will force him to take control of his own narrative. I think he's got no choice but to stand up there and to articulate a vision for why he wants to be president—which, at the moment, is unclear to me."

What's clear is this: When the feed goes live, both men will be as assiduously trained and groomed as two spaniels at Westminster. But then the leashes will come off, and for ninety minutes Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will perform an American tradition that has historically not brought out their best.

"For all of their ego and confidence, it's a huge amount of pressure," one Republican veteran of the debate trade told me. With a forlorn chuckle, he added, "The only thing that's worse is to be someone like me who spends months and months working with these guys—and then they go onstage, and you're absolutely helpless."

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